The Dark Marriage That Nearly Broke Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon

On the morning of May 6, 1960, a photographer with a shortened left leg stood in a private room at Clarence House while a valet fussed over the hang of his morning coat.

Across London, in a house he knew well, a woman eight months pregnant with his child was deciding whether she could bear to switch on the television.

That is the whole marriage compressed into a single morning, before a word of it had been spoken aloud in Westminster Abbey.

Anthony Armstrong-Jones was 29 years old that day. He had no title, no land, no private income worth the name, and two incomplete years of an architecture degree he had failed out of at Cambridge.

What he had was a studio on Pimlico Road, a motorcycle, a reputation among the theatrical set for being the most interesting man in any room he entered, and an engagement to Princess Margaret Rose, the sister of the Queen of England.

He also had a mistress named Camilla Fry, who was married to his closest friend, and who would give birth to his daughter three weeks later.

Nobody in that abbey knew. Not the Queen, who sat in the front row. Not the Queen Mother, who had spent months telling anyone who asked that she was delighted, and who spent the next 40 years failing to hide that she was not.

Not the 2,000 guests in the nave, not the hundreds of thousands lining the route to the river, and not the 300 million people watching on television sets from Sydney to Toronto.

This was the first royal wedding ever broadcast live by cameras from inside Westminster Abbey, and the British public had turned out for it in a state of something close to joy.

Margaret did not know either. She would find out eventually, though it took 44 years and a DNA test before it was confirmed rather than whispered. By then she had been dead for two years and could not be told.

There is a version of this story that has calcified into something resembling fact. In that version, Princess Margaret is a spoiled, drinking, chain-smoking royal who threw away a good man's love, and Lord Snowdon is a talented artist who married into a family that could not accommodate him.

It is tidy. It absolves almost everybody. The documented record tells a considerably uglier story, and the ugliness runs in a very particular direction.

The books this account is built from include Anne de Courcy's authorized biography of Snowdon, published in 2008 with his cooperation and his blessing, which is the single most damning document about him that exists precisely because he did not fight it.

Also Craig Brown's "Ma'am Darling," Anne Glenconner's "Lady in Waiting," the memoir of the woman who served as Margaret's lady-in-waiting for close to 30 years, and Christopher Warwick's authorized life of Margaret.

There is a handwritten note whose existence is confirmed by three separate sources who had no reason to coordinate, and its wording is identical in all three. Tony wrote it, folded it, and left it somewhere his wife would find it alone.

Accounts differ on where. One says a glove drawer. One says tucked into a book she was reading. The words do not differ at all.

He told her she looked like a Jewish manicurist and that he hated her, and then he signed off with a line about honesty as though he had done her a service.

That was not an outburst in the middle of a row. Tony did not do outbursts. That was a considered, drafted, physically written object that he made with his hands and placed where he knew she would be by herself when she found it.

There were more. Anne Glenconner describes a list left where Margaret would see it, headed with something to the effect of "24 reasons why I hate you."

She describes a man who would go silent for days at a stretch inside Kensington Palace, lock the door of his study, and then walk out the next morning and be charming to a photographer on the pavement.

She describes dinner parties at which Tony would work the table with genuine wit and then turn mid-laugh and say something about his wife's appearance or her intelligence or her age that landed like a slap.

The servants at Kensington Palace developed protocols. Staff who worked in that apartment in the early 1970s described a working method for moving between rooms in a specific order at specific times in order to avoid putting the Earl and the Princess in a corridor together.

Two children grew up inside that. David, born in 1961, and Sarah, born in 1964. Both have spent their adult lives declining with great courtesy and great firmness to describe it in any detail.

There is also the matter of what Tony did in 1976, which may be the coldest single act in this entire story and which has been consistently under-reported.

In February 1976, the News of the World published a photograph of Princess Margaret in swimwear beside a landscape gardener 17 years her junior named Roddy Llewellyn. It was the making of the modern British tabloid, and it very nearly finished her.

What almost nobody says is what her husband did with it. He did not defend her. He did not commiserate. He had been waiting years for exactly that kind of opening, and when it arrived, he took it to the palace and used it to push for a formal separation on terms that positioned him as the injured party.

He had been conducting affairs continuously since before the engagement, every single one of them, and he cashed in hers.

The separation was announced in March of that year. The divorce came through on July 11, 1978. Five months after that, Tony married a 27-year-old film researcher named Lucy Lindsay-Hogg. Margaret never married again.

There is a woman in this story called Anne Hills. She was a journalist, and she was Tony's mistress on and off for around 20 years, running underneath both of his marriages.

Her friends described a clever, funny woman who became steadily more unhappy about a position she could not change. She took her own life on New Year's Eve, 1996. Tony was told that evening. He went to the party he had been planning to attend.

And then, because this story refuses to be simple, there is the other Tony. The man who joined the Sunday Times magazine in 1962, the first color supplement in British newspaper history, and used it to send photographers into psychiatric hospitals and mining villages and the back streets of the industrial north.

The man who co-designed the aviary at London Zoo, that huge angular thing in tension steel that you can still see from the canal path in Regent's Park, and who did it without ever having finished an architecture degree.

The man who made a documentary about growing old that won two Emmy Awards. The man who lived his whole life with a leg that polio had shortened when he was 16, and who spent decades of that life fighting in the House of Lords for disabled people at a moment when almost no other peer in that chamber could be persuaded to care.

That work was not a performance. Everyone who has examined it closely, including the people least sympathetic to him, has concluded the same thing. He meant it.

He cared about disabled Britain he had never met with an intensity he could not summon for the woman asleep beside him.

Princess Margaret Rose was born on August 21, 1930, at Glamis Castle in Angus, four years and four months after her sister Elizabeth.

She was born into a position that had a name in every royal family in Europe and no job description in any of them. The heir does a thing. The spare exists in case the thing goes wrong.

Margaret worked that out at exactly six, because that was when her uncle abdicated. Before December 1936, the Yorks were a side branch. Her father, Albert, was the second son, a shy man with a stammer, and he had no expectation of the throne and no appetite for it.

Then Edward VIII gave up the crown for Wallis Simpson, and the shy second son became King George VI, and the world reorganized itself around the two little girls in a single winter.

Elizabeth was 10. She was taken aside and told in the careful and euphemistic manner of the institution what her life was now going to be. Constitutional history lessons began.

Margaret was six, and nobody took her aside at all, because there was nothing to tell her. Her life had changed completely and her function had not changed even slightly.

She had been the second daughter of a duke and she was now the second daughter of a king, and the arithmetic of her importance had been altered by precisely nothing.

What she developed instead of a function was a personality, and it was formidable. She could sing properly, in a way that made professional musicians pay attention. She played the piano well enough that Noel Coward went out of his way to say so.

She did impressions. She was very funny in the specific way of people who watch a room closely and notice the gap between what everyone is saying and what everyone actually means.

Household staff who served the family during the war years described the two sisters in language that gives the whole thing away. Elizabeth was spoken of with respect. Margaret was spoken of with a kind of nervous fondness, the way people talk about weather that is beautiful and might turn.

She was, in other words, the interesting one. And being the interesting one in an institution that has no use for interesting is a difficult position to occupy for a lifetime.

Her father adored her. George VI was besotted with his younger daughter in a manner that everybody around the family noticed and that at least some of them thought was doing her no favors.

He indulged her. He found her funny when she was being outrageous and he laughed when he ought to have corrected her. The compensation took the form of permission.

Margaret was permitted a latitude in her behavior that no other member of that family was permitted, and she grew up understanding charm as a currency and misbehavior as a form of visibility.

Then in February 1952, her father died at 56, and every protective structure in Margaret's life came out from under her at once. She was 21.

Her sister became Queen, which meant that the one person who had understood her position from the inside was now permanently on the far side of a constitutional wall.

And Margaret, in the middle of that, was in love with a man in her father's household. Group Captain Peter Townsend was a Battle of Britain pilot, which in 1950s Britain was roughly the highest social credential available to a man without a title.

He was 16 years older than Margaret, and he was married with two young sons. Townsend's marriage to Rosemary Pawle was already in trouble before Margaret entered the picture, and he divorced her in 1952 as the innocent party.

That legal distinction mattered a great deal in that decade, and it turned out in the end to matter not at all, because the Church of England did not recognize the innocent party distinction in the way that Margaret and Townsend needed it to be recognized.

The Queen was the supreme governor of the Church of England, and Margaret was third in line to the throne, and the whole thing collapsed under the weight of an institution that had spent the previous 16 years defining itself against exactly this situation.

The abdication was the reason. Sixteen years earlier, Margaret's uncle had given up the throne to marry a divorced woman, and the monarchy had come closer to falling over than at any point since the 17th century.

The men who ran the palace in 1953 had lived through it as adults. Tommy Lascelles, who had been private secretary to Edward VIII and then to George VI and was now private secretary to the new Queen, had watched the whole thing at close range and had drawn a permanent conclusion from it.

The public found out on June 2, 1953, coronation day. Margaret, in the abbey in front of the world's press, reached out and brushed a piece of fluff from the lapel of Peter Townsend's uniform.

It was an entirely trivial gesture and it was also the gesture of a woman who is comfortable enough with a man to touch his clothing in public, and an American reporter caught it and the story went around the world within a day.

Townsend was posted to Brussels as air attaché within weeks. Margaret was told she would have to wait until she was 25, at which point under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 she would no longer require the sovereign's consent.

She waited for two years. The country waited with her, and the newspapers ran countdown pieces. When she turned 25 in August 1955, the whole thing came to a head in the space of about 10 weeks.

What she discovered was that the 25-year clause had been a piece of arithmetic rather than a promise. Freedom from the sovereign's consent did not mean freedom. It meant the matter would go to Parliament.

The government of the day made it understood that cabinet would not approve, that the Commonwealth prime ministers were opposed, and that the practical consequence of proceeding would be Margaret's renunciation of her rights of succession, her royal title, her income under the civil list, and in all probability her ability to live in Britain.

On October 31, 1955, she issued a statement. It is a short document and it is one of the more painful things in the modern royal archive.

The operative line is that, mindful of the church's teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble and conscious of her duty to the Commonwealth, she had resolved to put these considerations before others.

She was 25 years old. She had done exactly what the institution required, and the institution, having got what it wanted, offered her nothing whatsoever in return, because there was nothing it had ever been designed to give her.

The Margaret who came out the other side of 1955 was not the same woman who had gone into it. Everyone who knew her says so.

The wit acquired an edge that could take skin off. The drinking, which had been social, became structural. She began the lifelong habit of insisting on the precise observance of her royal rank in situations where nobody had suggested otherwise.

She was also, at 25, extremely lonely, extremely famous and extremely available.

Nobody ever forbade Princess Margaret from marrying Peter Townsend. That is the first thing to understand, and it is the thing that made it so effective. There was no confrontation, no scene, no royal command.

What there was instead was a series of gentlemen in morning coats making arrangements, and each individual arrangement was reasonable, and the cumulative effect of them was a wall.

Townsend had been in royal service since 1944, and by 1952 he was deputy master of the household and controller to the Queen Mother's household at Clarence House, which meant he lived and worked in the same building as Margaret.

He was appointed air attaché to the British embassy in Brussels. Not Ottawa, not Johannesburg, not somewhere that would have looked like exile and generated sympathetic coverage. A short flight from London, a genuine diplomatic posting, entirely defensible in any newspaper, and approximately 300 miles from the woman he wanted to marry.

The timing of that posting is the part Margaret never forgave. She had been given to understand that Townsend would be moved after her sister's Commonwealth tour. He was moved in July 1953, before she returned from her own trip to Rhodesia.

She came back and he was gone, and the arrangement had been made while she was out of the country. That is not a refusal either. It is a diary decision.

She turned 25 on August 21, 1955. Townsend came to London in October. They spent time together at Allanbay Park in Berkshire at the house of friends, with photographers outside in numbers that had no precedent.

And then over about three weeks, she found out what the 25-year clause had actually been. Because being free of the sovereign's consent did not mean being free.

The matter went to the government, and the government of the day was Anthony Eden's. Eden himself was a divorced man who had remarried, which people at the time thought might help and which turned out to be irrelevant.

Cabinet took the position that it could not advise in favor. There were consultations with Commonwealth prime ministers and the responses were not encouraging.

On October 31, 1955, the statement was issued from Clarence House. Townsend helped her draft it. That detail comes from him in his own memoir, and it is one of the sadder facts in the whole episode. The two of them sat down together and composed the document that ended it.

Now think about what that statement did to her over the following 47 years. She had made a public declaration of principle. She had invoked the indissolubility of Christian marriage in her own name in a document that was reprinted in every newspaper in the world.

That statement was in the cutting library. It was available to any journalist at any time. Which meant that in 1976, when the separation was announced, and in 1978, when the divorce came through, every single newspaper in Britain had the option of running her own words from 1955 alongside the news. A number of them took it.

She was made to write the sentence that would be used against her 23 years later.

Townsend married Marie-Luce Jamagne in December 1959. She was 19 years old and she looked in the photographs startlingly like the young Princess Margaret, and the resemblance was widely commented on at the time by people who had the decency not to put it in print.

They were married for 36 years and had three children, and by all accounts it was a good marriage. He died in 1995 in France.

Anthony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones arrived on March 7, 1930, in London, five months before Princess Margaret was born at Glamis.

His father was Ronald Armstrong-Jones, a Welsh barrister with a successful practice and a family seat at Plas Dinas in Caernarvonshire, and what his son's biographer would later describe, with the delicacy that biographers reserve for men who are dead, as a highly sexed nature.

His mother was Anne Messel, one of the most photographed young women in London society. The Messels were not aristocracy. They were a family of German Jewish descent who had come to England in the 19th century, made money in the city, and then spent three generations converting that money into cultural position.

Anne's brother was Oliver Messel, who became one of the great stage designers of the 20th century, a man whose sets for Glyndebourne and Covent Garden defined a whole postwar visual manner in British theater.

The marriage ended in 1935. Anne divorced Ronald and remarried within a very short interval, and she remarried extremely well. Michael Parsons, the sixth Earl of Rosse, came with Birr Castle in County Offaly, a demesne of some 120 acres, one of the great gardens of Ireland, and a title that turned Anne Messel into the Countess of Rosse.

Tony was five years old and he was sent to Ireland with her. And what happened next is the thing that everybody who has written about him agrees was the origin of everything.

Anne already had two children by Ronald, Tony and his older sister Susan. She then had two sons with Lord Rosse, and those two boys, the Parsons boys, were the heirs of Birr. They belonged to the new life. They had the right surname, the right father, the right position in the house.

Tony had the wrong surname, a divorced barrister for a father, and no place in the arrangement at all. Anne de Courcy describes the household in terms that are almost startling in a book its subject approved. She writes of a boy who was close to an intruder in his own mother's second family.

There is a story, documented rather than folkloric, of Tony arriving at Birr for the holidays and being put in a room that had been chosen for its distance from everybody else.

His mother was not absent. She was there in the same building, being warm to two other boys in front of him, and being correct and slightly impatient with him. Being visibly ranked fourth out of four by a parent who is standing in the room is a different injury, and it does not scar over in the same way.

He went to Eton, which was expected, and he was not happy there. Then in 1946, when Tony was 16, the family was on holiday at Plas Dinas in Wales and he became ill.

He did not contract polio at Eton. He contracted it in Wales during the holidays, and he was taken by ambulance to the Liverpool Royal Infirmary, and he was there for six months.

Understand what polio meant in 1946, nine years before the Salk vaccine. It was the thing that parents in Britain and America genuinely feared above almost anything else, because it arrived without warning in the summer.

It took healthy children and it either killed them or it took their legs. And there was nothing whatsoever that medicine could do about it except wait and see which of those two outcomes you were going to get.

During those six months, Anne Messel, Countess of Rosse, visited her son twice. The reasons that have been offered are that she was afraid of infection and that she found illness distasteful.

The people who did go week after week were his father, Ronald, the man she had divorced, and his older sister Susan, who was in her early 20s and who sat with him.

He came out of Liverpool alive and walking, which was a better result than a great many children in that building got. His left leg came out shorter and thinner than his right. He had a limp for the remaining 70 years of his life.

Every biographer who has looked at Snowdon has reached for the same explanation, and all of them attach the same caveat, which is that this is an interpretation and not a fact.

The reading is that a 16-year-old boy lay in a hospital bed in Liverpool for half a year, learned that the person who was supposed to come did not come, and concluded from that experience that he would never again allow himself to be the one who is left.

He went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, to read architecture, and it went about as well as you would expect from a young man with that temperament and that recent history. He failed his second-year examinations and left without a degree.

Before he left, though, he did the thing he was proudest of. In March 1950, Tony Armstrong-Jones sat in the stern of the Cambridge boat as coxswain in the University Boat Race. And Cambridge won.

The cox is the smallest man in the crew, the one whose physical limitations are the entire point of his selection, the one who does not row and instead steers and shouts and holds eight much larger men to a rhythm for four and a quarter miles.

A boy with a withered leg who had been ranked last in his mother's house and who had spent half a year in a hospital bed took the tiller of the Cambridge eight and beat Oxford on the Tideway in front of a quarter of a million people. He kept the medal for the rest of his life.

Architecture being finished, he drifted into photography, and in retrospect there was never going to be anything else. The Messel was in him. He apprenticed under Baron Nahum, who worked professionally under the single name Baron and who was at that moment one of the two or three most connected photographers in Britain.

Baron did the court work. Baron did the society portraits. Baron was a close friend of Prince Philip and a founder member of the Thursday Club. Baron was also, until his death in 1956, the photographer who took Princess Margaret's official portraits.

When Baron died, there was a gap at the top of that particular profession, and a young man who had learned the trade in Baron's studio was extremely well positioned to fill it.

He set up on his own on Pimlico Road, and then he did something clever. The society photographers of that era worked in a particular way: formal, lit, arranged, the subject composed and slightly ennobled, the resulting print flattering and inert.

Tony went the other way. He photographed people in motion, off-balance, mid-sentence, caught. He got in close. He used available light where the convention was to use a great deal of expensive equipment.

He photographed the theater world rather than the aristocratic world, or rather he photographed the moment when those two worlds were beginning to dissolve into one another, which is exactly the moment Britain was living through and which nobody else in his trade had quite noticed yet.

Laurence Olivier sat for him. Vivien Leigh sat for him. Marlene Dietrich sat for him. He was by 1957 the most fashionable photographer in London, and he was 27 years old.

Anthony Armstrong-Jones was bisexual. In the world he moved in, the theatrical and artistic London of the 1950s, this was not a secret. It was simply not printed, because until 1967 sexual acts between men were criminal offenses in England and Wales.

The interior designer Nicky Haslam, in his memoir "Redeeming Features," wrote about a brief affair with him. Snowdon himself, when de Courcy raised it with him for the authorized book, produced one of the more artful sentences in modern British memoir.

He said that he did not fall in love with boys but that a few men had been in love with him. It denies nothing. It concedes everything and admits nothing.

And then there is Jeremy Fry. Jeremy Fry was of the Fry chocolate family, an engineer and inventor of real ability, and he was one of Tony's closest friends in the world. Fry was married to a woman named Camilla.

Through 1959, while he was secretly courting the sister of the Queen of England, Tony Armstrong-Jones was also conducting an affair with his best friend's wife. Camilla Fry became pregnant.

Her daughter, Polly, was born on May 28, 1960. The wedding at Westminster Abbey had taken place on May 6, 22 days earlier.

On the morning he married Princess Margaret in front of 300 million people, Tony knew that a woman he had been sleeping with was in her ninth month, and he knew who the father was, and he went to the abbey.

Polly Fry was raised as Jeremy Fry's daughter, and Jeremy Fry raised her, and by every account raised her well. The rumor circulated in that social set for decades. In 2004, a DNA test settled it.

Polly was 44 years old when she learned with scientific certainty that the man in all those newspaper photographs was her father. Snowdon acknowledged her. Jeremy Fry, who had spent 44 years being her father in every sense that counts, never said a public word about any of it.

The introduction of Tony to Margaret happened in 1958 at a dinner given by Lady Elizabeth Cavendish at number five Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. Lady Elizabeth was one of Margaret's ladies-in-waiting and a close friend.

What happened at that table was that a 28-year-old princess who had spent three years being brave in public met a 28-year-old photographer who was funny, irreverent, physically unlike anybody in her ordinary life, entirely unimpressed by her rank, and extremely good at making a person feel that they were the only interesting thing in the room.

Making somebody feel seen is the core competence of a portrait photographer. Tony had spent five years professionalizing it.

Margaret had been photographed more than any woman in Britain and had never once in her entire life been looked at rather than at.

The courtship that followed was a piece of operational secrecy that would have done credit to a government department, and it worked for a year and a half in a country where every newspaper in Fleet Street had a standing brief to find out who Princess Margaret was going to marry.

The mechanism was a room in Bermondsey. Tony rented the upper floor of number 59 Rotherhithe Street, a semi-derelict house on the south bank of the Thames down river from Tower Bridge.

The room had a window that looked straight out at the water and the shipping. It had cold water, peeling wallpaper, and no heating worth the name.

Margaret came repeatedly over a period of many months. She was driven down in an unmarked car. She sat on the floor by that window and drank and smoked and watched the barges and was, for a few hours at a time, a woman in a room with a man rather than the third person in the order of succession.

And Fleet Street never found it, because the entire British press had made an assumption. Margaret was going to marry a landed man. Nobody was watching a freelance photographer with a motorcycle.

In late February 1960, Princess Margaret received a letter from Peter Townsend. He wrote to tell her that he had met a young Belgian woman named Marie-Luce Jamagne and that he intended to marry her.

Margaret confirmed this sequence herself to Christopher Warwick for the authorized biography. She received that letter and within the same week she accepted Tony's proposal. The engagement was announced on February 26, 1960.

Margaret herself put those two events next to each other when she talked about it, and she was not a woman who did things by accident when she was telling her own story.

The public reaction to the engagement was enormous, warm, and slightly bewildered. Margaret had been the tragic heroine of the decade, and now she was marrying a photographer, and the papers could not decide whether this was a triumph of modern romance over stuffy protocol or a young woman settling for something beneath her.

The palace reaction was colder than anything printed. Anthony Armstrong-Jones was the first person without a title to marry the daughter of a British king in something like 400 years.

The courtiers of 1960 were men who had been formed by the 1930s, and their private assessment of the situation was conveyed in the nickname that went round the private secretaries' corridor, which was "the Jones boy."

The Queen Mother, who had considerable social antenna and considerable capacity for a cold shoulder delivered through perfect manners, never warmed to him. Not in 1960 and not in the 42 years afterwards.

The wedding took place on Friday, May 6, 1960, at Westminster Abbey. It was the first royal wedding in history broadcast live by television cameras from inside the abbey, and the decision to permit that was contested inside the palace right up until it was made.

Around 300 million people watched. 20,000 people lined the route. The Britannia was waiting at Tower Pier to take the couple to the Caribbean for a six-week honeymoon.

Margaret wore a Norman Hartnell dress of white silk organza, deliberately plain in line, with a full skirt and a 30-foot tulle veil. She wore the Poltimore tiara, which she had bought at auction herself.

Tony wore morning dress and walked up the aisle without visibly favoring his left leg, which took work. The Queen, in every frame in which she appears, looks like a woman attending an event about which she has private reservations that she will be taking to her grave.

Somewhere across London, Camilla Fry was eight months pregnant.

The first fight inside the palace about the wedding was about the cameras. Permitting television inside Westminster Abbey for a wedding had no precedent. The coronation had been broadcast in 1953 over the objections of the cabinet and Churchill personally, and the Queen had overruled them and been proved right.

But a coronation is a religious ceremony of state. A wedding is a family event, and there was a substantial body of opinion inside the palace holding that a family event should not be broadcast, that the cameras would produce spectacle rather than dignity, and that once you had let them in for one wedding, you would never get them out again.

That last objection was correct in every particular. The men making it were not being stuffy. They had identified precisely what was going to happen, and they were overruled anyway, and it happened.

The second fight was about the guest list, and specifically about who was not coming. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were not invited.

The effect was that the abbey was full of British guests, and a great many of them were Tony's, which had never happened at a royal wedding before. His own people were actors and designers and photographers and writers from Pimlico and Chelsea, and they sat in Westminster Abbey among the hereditary peers and the diplomatic corps.

Jeremy Fry had originally been asked to be best man. That is documented, and it is one of the more extraordinary facts in this whole story, because it means that Tony's first choice to stand beside him at the altar was the husband of the woman carrying his child.

Fry withdrew a few weeks before the wedding. The public reason given was jaundice. The private reason, which has been reported consistently since, was that a spent conviction of Fry's for a homosexual offense had surfaced in a security check and the palace could not have it.

So a man was removed from the wedding party over a conviction for something that would cease to be a crime seven years later.

The man who replaced him was Dr. Roger Gilliatt, a neurologist who was a considerably safer proposition. Camilla Fry attended the wedding, eight months pregnant, in the abbey watching.

The service began at 11:30. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, conducted it. Margaret was given away by the Duke of Edinburgh, since her father was dead and her uncle was not present.

The dress was Norman Hartnell, and it was, by the standards of that designer, extremely restrained: white silk organza, 30 yards of it, a fitted bodice, a very full skirt, no decoration whatsoever, and a veil of silk tulle.

The reason was that Tony had opinions about it and Tony's opinions won. The bride's dress at a royal wedding in 1960 was designed to the specification of the groom, because the groom was a professional visual artist who understood how the photographs would look and because he intended the photographs to be good.

She wore the Poltimore tiara, which she had bought herself at auction in 1959 for about £5,500. It is tall and it is Victorian and it converts into a necklace, and she wore it high on her head with her hair swept up beneath it. It sold again in 2006 after her death for nearly a million pounds.

After the service, the couple came out into a London that had turned out in enormous numbers. They traveled in the glass coach, and at Tower Pier they boarded the royal yacht Britannia and sailed for a six-week honeymoon in the Caribbean.

The Britannia took them to Trinidad, Tobago, Antigua, Dominica, St. Lucia, and Mustique. Mustique enters the story here. Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner, had bought the entire island in 1958 for about £45,000.

Tennant was a friend of Margaret's from before the marriage, and he had given her as a wedding present a 10-acre plot of land on the island. She went to look at it on the honeymoon. She kept it for 40 years and eventually built Les Jolies Eaux on it.

The house was designed with substantial input from Oliver Messel, Tony's uncle, which means the villa that became the symbol of Princess Margaret's extravagance was designed by her husband's family.

The honeymoon was by all accounts happy. They came back to Britain in June 1960. Polly Fry had been born on May 28 while they were at sea.

The marriage began happily. That is important and it gets forgotten because the ending is so bad that everybody reads it backwards into the beginning.

For the first three or four years, by the consistent testimony of everyone who saw them, Tony and Margaret were in love and it showed. He photographed her constantly and the pictures from that period are the best portraits of her that exist.

She was proud of him in a way that royal wives were not usually permitted to be proud of anything. He made her laugh. She defended his career fiercely inside a family that regarded professional work by an in-law as faintly embarrassing.

Then a title arrived, and a child arrived, and something began to go wrong.

The title came in October 1961, and it came for a reason that had nothing to do with honoring Anthony Armstrong-Jones. Margaret was pregnant. The child would be a grandchild of King George VI and a nephew or niece of the reigning Queen, and under the rules as they stood, that child would be born to a father who had no title.

On October 6, 1961, by letters patent, Tony was created Earl of Snowdon and Viscount Linley of Nymans. He had refused a title at the time of the wedding. That is on the record and it is one of the more interesting things he ever did.

Eighteen months later, he took it, because the alternative was his son being born without one, and because by then he had learned what life inside that family was actually like without rank to protect you.

David Albert Charles Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley, was born on November 3, 1961. Lady Sarah Frances Elizabeth Armstrong-Jones followed on May 1, 1964.

The Snowdons lived at apartment 1A Kensington Palace, a substantial house in all but name, 20 rooms of it, on the west side of the palace complex. They also had Old House at Nymans in Sussex.

Tony kept a studio, and Margaret kept the establishment that came with being a princess, which meant a private secretary, a lady-in-waiting, a dresser, a chauffeur, and a household budget that came out of the civil list and that was scrutinized in Parliament by men who resented every pound of it.

Inside that marriage was a permanent and unspoken accounting problem, which was that one partner was paid by the state for existing and the other was paid by newspapers for working, and each of them held that fact against the other in a different direction.

In November 1965, the Snowdons went to America. It was a semi-official tour and the framing of it was cultural and commercial. They went to Washington and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Arizona and New York. They were received at the White House by Lyndon Johnson.

In Hollywood, they were received by absolutely everybody, because in 1965 a genuinely glamorous British princess married to a genuinely fashionable photographer was the single most interesting social proposition available in Southern California.

They dined with the Kennedy family. There was a party at the Beverly Hills house of Sharman Douglas, whose father had been American ambassador in London and who was one of Margaret's oldest friends.

The room contained Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and Fred Astaire and Judy Garland and Paul Newman and Alfred Hitchcock and Gene Kelly and Julie Andrews and Natalie Wood. Margaret sang at the piano with Astaire and Garland in the room.

Tony was in his element. This was his world extended and amplified. These were photographers and directors and performers, which meant they were his colleagues rather than his wife's subjects. And for the first time since the wedding, the two of them were operating in a social environment where his currency was worth more than hers.

The American press adored them. Back in Britain, the coverage was the beginning of everything that came later. Because the trip cost money and the money was public, and the questions started before they had landed back at Heathrow.

There was a row about the cost of the RAF transport. There were questions in the House about the itinerary and about how much of it had been official and how much had been a holiday at the taxpayers' expense.

A Labour MP named Willie Hamilton, who would spend the next 20 years as the most persistent critic of royal finance in Parliament, began the campaign that made his name, and Margaret was his preferred target for the whole of it.

After 1965, the pattern that everybody describes settled in over about two years. Tony took on more work and took it further away. In 1967 and 1968 he was traveling constantly for the Sunday Times and he began the documentary work, and each of those commitments was legitimate and each of them was also an exit.

He installed a lock on the door of his study at Kensington Palace, and he had a light fitted, or in some accounts a system of signs, which indicated whether he could be approached.

Set that against what he did for a living. He was a portrait photographer. The entire basis of his professional reputation was the ability to make another human being feel completely attended to. And in his own house, he built a mechanism to inform his wife without having to speak to her that she did not currently qualify.

Margaret responded in the way that people respond when they have no functional means of raising a grievance, which is by escalating the terms. The hours got later. She began to fill the house with her own circle. The drinking, which had been evening drinking, moved earlier.

Her own affairs began in this period, and the sequence is worth stating because it matters for any assessment of blame. Tony was unfaithful before the wedding. Margaret's first documented involvement outside the marriage is Anthony Barton in 1966, six years in.

Robin Douglas-Home came in 1967. He was a pianist and a writer, a nephew of the former prime minister Alec Douglas-Home, and he was charming and unstable and in serious financial trouble. The involvement with Margaret was brief and by her standards indiscreet, and it ended in 1967. In October 1968, he took his own life. He was 36.

Two more things about the middle of that marriage, both documented, both of which get left out of the standard account.

The first is that they went on working together professionally, and it went well. Tony photographed Margaret repeatedly across the whole marriage, including deep into the bad years, and the pictures are superb. Whatever else was true, they respected each other's competence.

The second is that both of them were funny about it. There is a strain of extremely dark humor running through the accounts of that marriage from people who were present, in which both parties made jokes about the state of it, sometimes to each other, and the jokes were good.

Anybody who has read Glenconner or Brown knows that Princess Margaret had a tongue that could remove paint and that she used it on her husband as well as on everybody else.

The difference, and this is why the marriage cannot be scored as a draw, is in the instruments. She was cutting in public, in the moment, in the ordinary currency of a bad marriage between two clever people. He wrote things down in his own hand and left them where she would be alone when she found them, and then went silent for a week.

One of those is a fight. The other is a campaign.

Every biography of this marriage identifies a period somewhere between 1963 and 1965 when the temperature changed, and none of them can point to a single event that caused it, because there was not one. What there was instead was an accumulation, and the accumulation ran in about four directions at once.

The first was the work. Tony had joined the Sunday Times magazine in 1962 as artistic adviser, and the job took him away constantly, and it was the making of him professionally, and Margaret could not come.

Royal protocol did not permit the Queen's sister to accompany a magazine photographer to a psychiatric hospital in the Midlands. So he had a life that ran on trains and airplanes and hotel rooms and assignments, and it was full of interesting people who were not royal, and she had a life that ran on engagements at which she cut ribbons.

The second was the family. Tony had married into an institution that had no idea what to do with him. He was not a courtier, so he had no function. He was not a royal, so he had no rank of his own beyond what had been handed down to make his son legitimate. He was not staff, so he could not be managed.

The third was Margaret herself, and honesty requires this to be said plainly rather than folded into sympathy. Margaret was difficult to live with. She was difficult to work for, and there are dozens of staff accounts confirming it.

She kept impossible hours, going to bed at three and rising at 11, which meant the household worked two shifts to accommodate one woman. She drank steadily from lunchtime. She smoked between 60 and 80 cigarettes a day through a holder, which eventually cost her a lung.

She could turn on a friend of 20 years for a misjudged remark and freeze them out for a year. She insisted in social situations where nobody had raised the question on the precise observance of her rank, and she did it most often with people who were fond of her.

Anne Glenconner, who loved her and who served her for something close to 30 years, does not pretend otherwise in her memoir. She describes the exhaustion of it alongside the affection, and the two things sit next to each other on the page without resolving.

The fourth thing is the one that makes the other three insufficient as an explanation, which is that Tony never stopped having affairs and had never intended to.

He did not stop during the engagement, when Camilla Fry was carrying his child. He did not stop during the honeymoon period of the marriage. He did not stop in the good years.

The names that have been documented from the 1960s and 1970s include Lady Jacqueline Rufus Isaacs, the American journalist Pamela Colin, and Anne Hills, who by that stage had already begun what became a 20-year arrangement.

Margaret, abandoned in her own house and humiliated in front of her own circle, eventually did the same. Her documented affairs include Anthony Barton, a Bordeaux wine producer who was an old friend of both of them and who was godfather to Sarah.

And from around 1973, Roddy Llewellyn. Two people committing adultery inside an aristocratic marriage in that era was not remarkable. Whole swathes of the English upper class ran on precisely that arrangement and had done for 200 years.

What made this marriage different was not the affairs. It was what Tony did between them.

The most famous note is quoted in de Courcy, in Craig Brown's "Ma'am Darling," and in Glenconner's "Lady in Waiting." Three sources, three different authors, three different relationships to the subject, and the wording is identical in all of them.

It read that she looked like a Jewish manicurist and that he hated her, followed by a line offering it as a piece of honesty from him.

The accounts differ on where she found it. One version places it in her glove drawer. Another has it slipped between the pages of a book she was reading. What does not vary is the wording, and Snowdon never denied it in a life during which he denied a number of other things.

The note required him to think of the phrase, to find paper, to write it out in his own hand, to fold it, to select a location she would go to alone, and to place it there and then walk away and continue his day knowing it was waiting.

Then it required him to be in the house when she found it, and to say nothing.

Glenconner records that there were others. She describes a list left where Margaret would come across it, headed with words to the effect of "24 reasons why I hate you," itemized.

Beyond the written material, there was the technique that everybody who spent time in that apartment describes, which was the withdrawal. Tony would stop speaking to her, not for an evening, for days at a time, sometimes for a week or more.

He would go into his study at Kensington Palace and close the door and communicate only through staff if he communicated at all, and then he would emerge and be entirely normal and never refer to it.

If you want to understand why the notes and the silences were worse than the affairs, that is why. An affair is an injury. This was a system. It ran continuously. It was unpredictable by design.

Craig Brown, writing in 2017, used the word gaslighting, and he used it before the term had been worn out by overuse. His argument is that Tony understood Margaret's specific vulnerabilities with unusual precision and used every one of them as an instrument.

Glenconner, who was in the room, reached the same conclusion by observation over three decades, and her language in the memoir is harder than Brown's. She describes a man who appeared to take pleasure in it.

Then there were the dinner parties, and these are the incidents that the largest number of independent witnesses saw with their own eyes.

Tony was superb company. That has to be understood or none of this makes sense. He was funny. He was interested in people. He told stories well. He made a table go.

And in the middle of that performance, he would turn to his wife and say something about her appearance or her weight or her age or her intelligence, and it would be phrased as a joke, and it would land in front of eight or 10 of their own friends.

The joke construction is the cruelest part of the design. It makes the target responsible for her own reaction. If she absorbs it, the humiliation is complete. If she objects, she has no sense of humor and has spoiled the evening.

By the late 1960s, apartment 1A had stopped functioning as a house. The staff accounts of this period are the most vivid evidence in the whole story precisely because the people giving them had no stake in the outcome.

There were routes. If the Princess was in the drawing room, you went round. If the Earl was working, that corridor was closed and you did not test it. Messages between the two principal residents of the house were carried by staff who had to decide in the moment how to phrase a thing that had been said in anger so that it would not detonate at the other end.

They stopped sharing a bedroom. They stopped traveling together where the diary allowed it. And where the diary did not allow it, they traveled together and did not speak in the car.

Two children were growing up inside it. David was born in 1961 and Sarah in 1964, which means that by 1970, when the household had fully hardened into its cold war shape, they were nine and six.

Both of them have declined consistently across their entire adult lives to describe it in any detail. David Linley built a furniture business and became by common consent one of the most private and least troublesome people ever to be born into proximity with that family.

Sarah Chatto became a painter and married an actor and has given perhaps a handful of interviews in 50 years. When either of them has spoken about their parents, the language has been affectionate, brief, and constructed with visible care.

Both David and Sarah have said in different words at different times that their father was fun, that he was the parent who made things, who took them places, who was interested in what they were doing.

Tony was, by the evidence, a good father in the ordinary daily sense, while being a systematically cruel husband in the same building at the same time. That combination is harder to process than a straightforwardly bad man would be.

It means the cruelty was not a temperament he could not control. It was a thing he did to a specific person, and he was capable of switching it off when he walked into a different room.

Meanwhile, outside the house, both of their careers were doing the opposite of the marriage. Tony's reputation rose continuously through the 1960s and 1970s. Margaret's public standing went the other way.

She was photographed on holiday. She was photographed smoking. She was photographed with a drink in her hand at four in the afternoon on Mustique. The public mood on Margaret curdled through the 1970s.

She was the royal who did not work hard enough, cost too much, drank in the sun, and had a young man. Every one of those charges had some basis, and every one of them was applied to her in a way it was not applied to men in the same family doing similar things.

Roddy Llewellyn was 25 years old in 1973. Princess Margaret was 43. He was the second son of Sir Harry Llewellyn, who had won a team gold medal in show jumping at the Helsinki Olympics on a horse called Foxhunter.

He was training as a landscape gardener. He had almost no money. He was gentle, unassertive, faintly hopeless in the manner that some very charming young men are. And he had, by every account of everyone who met him, an entirely uncomplicated sweetness.

They met at Kenmill, a house in Scotland, at a lunch arranged by Colin Tennant. Margaret had spent 13 years married to a man who withheld affection as a matter of policy, who mocked her in front of her friends, and who wrote her notes telling her that he hated her.

Roddy Llewellyn was kind to her. That is the whole thing. He was kind to her consistently in private and in public over a period of years, and he asked her for nothing, and he did not compete with her.

The relationship lasted in various forms for around eight years. He went to Mustique with her. He stayed at Les Jolies Eaux. He was absorbed into her circle.

The Queen, who was informed of the situation and who tended to deal with her sister's private life by declining to have opinions about it in public, was reportedly kind to him on the occasions they met.

Tony knew. Of course he knew. Everybody in that world knew, and Tony was in that world professionally, and Tony waited.

For roughly three years, the Earl of Snowdon, who had been conducting his own affairs continuously since before the engagement, knew that his wife was involved with Roddy Llewellyn and did nothing about it. He did not confront her. He did not leave. He kept his position, kept his apartment at Kensington Palace, kept the professional standing that came with the connection, and waited for something to happen that he could use.

In February 1976, it happened. A photograph appeared in the News of the World. It showed Princess Margaret and Roddy Llewellyn on the beach at Mustique, both in swimwear, sitting together.

By any reasonable standard, it was an innocuous picture. What made it detonate was the arithmetic that the newspaper printed alongside it, which was that she was 45 and he was 28 and that the taxpayer was funding the establishment that had produced the holiday.

The British press in 1976 was entering the most aggressive phase in its history. Rupert Murdoch had owned the News of the World for seven years and the Sun for seven years. The circulation war between the popular papers was being fought with a ferocity that had no precedent, and royal material was the single most reliable weapon in it.

The coverage that followed was savage. There were questions in Parliament about her civil list money. A Labour MP called for her to be removed from it entirely. Newspapers ran editorials about her cost, her working hours, her drinking, and her morals.

And this is the moment at which her husband made his move. Tony had been abroad on assignment when the photograph ran. He came back into a situation in which his wife was the most publicly humiliated woman in Britain, in which she had no defenders in the press, in which the palace was scrambling, and in which any action he took would be read by the public as the reaction of a wronged man.

He went to the palace and pushed for a formal separation.

Tony had been unfaithful from before the wedding day, continuously for 16 years, including at least one child born to another woman during the marriage and a mistress of long standing. Margaret had one relationship conducted over three years with a man who was kind to her.

A newspaper photographed it, and her husband used that photograph as the instrument to end the marriage on terms that made him the injured party at the precise moment when she had no public credit left to spend and nothing at all to bargain with.

The separation was announced on March 19, 1976. Tony was widely treated as a man who had endured a great deal. Margaret was treated as a woman who had brought it on herself.

The interior of that marriage was known in detail to perhaps 30 people, none of whom were going to talk in 1976. And so the version that reached the country was the version the newspapers had already decided on.

Between the separation in March 1976 and the divorce in July 1978, Tony moved out of Kensington Palace and took a house in Kensington. He kept working. His professional life, which had been built substantially on the access of the preceding 16 years, continued without interruption, and his reputation in the press was, if anything, improved by the separation.

Margaret's collapsed further. In the summer of 1976, she was ill and the papers reported the illness in terms that made it a moral event. Roddy Llewellyn, who was 28 years old and who had never in his life been prepared for anything remotely like the attention now directed at him, went to Turkey for a period, which the press covered as an abandonment. He came back.

The divorce came through on July 11, 1978. It is frequently said that this was the first divorce of a senior British royal since Henry VIII. It is more accurate to say since Princess Margaret Tudor, Henry's sister, in 1527, which is 451 years.

For the working central immediate royal family, the family whose members appear on the balcony, this was the first one in four and a half centuries, and it happened to the woman who had been made to give up Peter Townsend in 1955 specifically because the Church of England could not countenance a royal marriage touched by divorce.

She surrendered the man she loved at the age of 25 in a public statement invoking the church's teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, in order to protect an institution from the taint of divorce. Twenty-three years later, that same institution processed her own divorce from the man she married instead, and the world had changed enough by then that it cost the monarchy very little.

She had paid the full price for a rule that was abandoned without ceremony inside her own lifetime.

Tony left the marriage with his career, his reputation, his professional archive, and his freedom. Margaret kept Les Jolies Eaux on Mustique, which had been given to her as land by Colin Tennant and built with a house that Tony had helped design, and which became the thing the newspapers used against her for the rest of her life.

She kept the ring, too. She wore her wedding ring until she died.

Five months after the decree absolute, on December 15, 1978, Snowdon married Lucy Lindsay-Hogg. Lucy was 27, Tony was 48. She was a film researcher, the daughter of a baronet, and she had until recently been married to the film and television director Michael Lindsay-Hogg.

Their daughter, Lady Frances Armstrong-Jones, was born in July 1979.

Anne Hills was a journalist and she was good at it. She wrote on archaeology and heritage and travel. She worked for a range of publications over a long career. The people who knew her professionally described somebody capable, curious, and funny in the dry way of people who have spent their lives around deadlines.

She met Anthony Armstrong-Jones in the 1970s, and she remained his mistress on and off for approximately 20 years.

That relationship began while he was married to Princess Margaret at Kensington Palace. It survived the Mustique photograph and the separation and the divorce. It survived his marriage to Lucy Lindsay-Hogg in 1978. It survived the birth of his daughter Frances in 1979, and it was still going in the 1990s.

She was not a fling. A fling is an event. This was a fixed feature sustained across two decades and two marriages.

What her friends have said about her position is consistent and it is difficult to read. She understood exactly what she was and she had understood it for a very long time. She was the woman he would not leave a wife for, and she had watched him not leave two of them.

By 1996, she had reason to believe that after 20 years, she had been superseded by somebody in her 20s.

On December 31, 1996, New Year's Eve, Anne Hills took her own life. She went to the roof of the building where she lived in Highgate, and she died there. She was 57 years old.

Snowdon was informed that evening. He then went to the New Year's Eve party he had been intending to attend.

He was 66 years old and a peer of the House of Lords, and there was nobody in Britain who could have compelled him to attend a party on December 31, 1996.

Roughly a year later, Snowdon began the relationship that ended his second marriage. Melanie Cable-Alexander was an editor at Country Life magazine. She was in her early 30s. He was 67. She became pregnant, and on April 30, 1998, she gave birth to a son. His name is Jasper Cable-Alexander.

The birth reached the newspapers. It was not managed. It was not announced. It was reported in the way that Margaret's holiday in 1976 had been reported, by papers that had worked out that a private life could be printed if it was interesting enough and the subject could not stop you.

Which meant that Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, who had been married to him for 19 years and who was the mother of his daughter, found out that her husband had fathered a child with a woman in her 30s by the same route as everybody else in the country. She filed for divorce. It was finalized in 2000.

In 1976, he had used a newspaper photograph of his wife on a beach to engineer a separation on his own terms. Twenty-two years later, a newspaper printed the fact of his son by another woman and his second wife ended their marriage on hers.

In 1999, the House of Lords Act removed the great majority of hereditary peers from the chamber. Snowdon's earldom was hereditary, so under the act he would have lost his seat.

On November 16, 1999, he was created a life peer as Baron Armstrong-Jones of Nymans in the county of West Sussex, specifically so that he could remain in the House of Lords. The reason given was that he had work in that chamber that would not otherwise get done.

He had spent decades on disability legislation and disability access and the practical mechanics of how a disabled person moves through a British city, and he was one of the very few peers who cared about it, and by some distance the most effective.

So in the same 12-month period during which his second wife divorced him over a child by another woman, Parliament arranged a special dispensation to keep him in the legislature because his advocacy for disabled people was too valuable to lose.

Margaret's last 24 years are the part of this story that almost nobody tells, because there is no plot in them. There is only a woman getting smaller.

She was 47 when the divorce came through. She lived to be 71. That is nearly a quarter of a century after the marriage ended, which is longer than the marriage lasted, and the shape of it was set within about two years.

Roddy Llewellyn stayed in her life until 1981. He was 33 that year and he married Tatiana Soskin, a woman his own age, and he told Margaret before he told the papers, and she was reportedly generous about it in a way that cost her something. They remained friends. When she was dying, he was among the people who came.

The winters, or parts of them, were spent on Mustique at Les Jolies Eaux. The house was small by the standards you would imagine, five bedrooms on a promontory, and she loved it with a fierceness that had a great deal to do with the fact that it was hers.

Nobody in that family had given it to her. It came from Colin Tennant, and she had built on it herself, and it was the only place on earth where she could sit outside in a swimsuit with a drink and be neither the Queen's sister nor a line item in the civil list.

The papers punished her for it every single year. There was a standing arrangement in Fleet Street whereby the Mustique trip generated at least one story about cost and at least one about idleness. She knew the stories were coming and she went anyway.

The rest of the year was Kensington Palace, apartment 1A, the same 20 rooms she had shared with Tony, now occupied by one woman, her staff, and the accumulated furniture of a marriage.

She worked. She was patron or president of something in the region of 80 organizations, and she did the engagements, unglamorous ones in the rain in provincial towns, for decades.

The Royal Ballet, which she genuinely knew about and genuinely cared about. The NSPCC, the Girl Guides, hospitals, regiments. Nobody wrote about a Princess Margaret hospital visit because it was not a story, and the accumulated tonnage of those unreported afternoons across 40 years was substantial.

Her annual engagement count through the 1970s and 1980s ran to a figure in the low hundreds, not the highest in the family, nowhere near the lowest either. She did more official work in most years than several relatives who have never been described in print as idle.

And she did it while being the only member of the family whose civil list allocation was subject to an annual parliamentary campaign specifically directed at her.

Willie Hamilton, the Labour member for West Fife, made royal finance his subject for over 20 years, and Margaret was his preferred illustration of the argument. He called her in the House and in print expensive and idle, and he used considerably harsher formulations than that.

The mechanics of why she was the target rather than anybody else are not mysterious. She had no constitutional function, so there was no dignity to be violated by attacking her. She had a visible private life, which gave the attack something to hang on. She holidayed somewhere warm and photogenic. She was a woman, and the specific charges leveled at her were charges that were not leveled at men in that family who were doing all three.

She was also by the 1980s unwell in ways that were the direct and predictable result of how she had lived. She had smoked since she was a teenager, up to 60 or 80 a day at the peak, always through a holder.

In January 1985, she had part of her left lung removed at the Brompton Hospital. She was 54. The lesion was benign, which was the outcome everybody had been dreading against, and the operation was widely reported as a warning. She had not heeded it. She resumed smoking, though at a reduced rate, and she continued drinking.

In 1998 on Mustique, she had a stroke. It was described as mild at the time. She recovered function and she went back to work within months.

In February 1999, in the bathroom of the house on Mustique, she scalded her feet very badly. The circumstances were reported in several conflicting versions at the time, and the detail was never fully clarified. What is not in dispute is the severity.

The burns were serious enough to require months of treatment. They impaired her mobility permanently, and from that point she used a wheelchair for the majority of her public appearances.

She was 68. She had spent 40 years being photographed and having her appearance dissected in print. And now she was going to appear in public in a wheelchair wearing dark glasses because her eyesight had been affected, in front of the same photographers.

Further strokes followed in 2001. She lost mobility on her left side. She lost a substantial part of her sight. She largely withdrew from public life.

In her bedroom at Kensington Palace until the end, there was a framed photograph of Group Captain Peter Townsend.

She had been made to give him up in 1955 at the age of 25 to protect the Church of England's position on the indissolubility of marriage. She had married a man five years later who spent 16 years telling her she was ridiculous. She had been divorced in 1978, which was the very thing she had sacrificed Townsend to prevent.

She had spent 24 years alone afterwards, and the photograph on the table was of the man from 1955.

Townsend himself died in 1995 in France, married to Marie-Luce for 36 years. He wrote a memoir in 1978 called "Time and Chance" in which he handled the whole episode with a restraint that reads at this distance as a form of protection.

Princess Margaret died at 6:00 in the morning on February 9, 2002, at King Edward VII's Hospital in London after a final stroke and cardiac problems. She was 71. David and Sarah were with her.

She was cremated at Slough, which was unusual for a member of that family and was done at her own request, and her ashes were placed in the King George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor, beside her father.

Her mother outlived her by seven weeks. The Queen Mother died on March 30, 2002, at the age of 101.

Snowdon attended her funeral. He was 71 and by that stage using a stick. He gave over the following years a small number of remarks about her, and they were affectionate and imprecise and revealed nothing whatsoever. He never wrote about the marriage.

When de Courcy interviewed him at length for the authorized biography, he cooperated fully, gave her access to his papers, permitted her to publish material about his affairs and his cruelty that no other subject of an authorized biography has permitted, and declined throughout to offer any explanation of it.

He did not deny. He did not justify. He did not present a version in which he was misunderstood. He handed a biographer the material and let her draw the conclusion, and the conclusion is devastating, and he read it and made no complaint.

In February 1962, the Sunday Times published the first color supplement in the history of British newspapers, and Anthony Armstrong-Jones was its artistic adviser.

Nobody had done it before. A free color magazine printed on good paper, delivered inside a broadsheet newspaper to something over a million households every Sunday morning.

The conventional use of color in 1962 was for pleasant things. Color was for fashion, for food, for travel, for the royal family, for advertising. Color was expensive and therefore color was reserved for material that flattered.

Snowdon sent photographers into psychiatric hospitals. He commissioned work on the back-to-back housing of the industrial north, on mining communities, on the elderly poor, on the residents of long-stay mental institutions, who at that point in Britain were kept in conditions that the country had collectively agreed not to look at.

And it ran in color, at that size, on the reproduction quality that only advertising had previously commanded, into the homes of middle-class families in the Home Counties on a Sunday morning between the fashion pages and the motoring column.

The decision to use color on poverty was the whole intervention. Black and white had by 1962 become the visual language of social documentary. And in becoming a language, it had become a genre. And in becoming a genre, it had become something a reader could recognize and turn past.

Color was the language of desire. Putting a psychiatric ward in color on that paper stock removed the protective distance, and readers complained, and the complaints were the evidence that it had worked.

His own portrait work from that decade and the one after is in the National Portrait Gallery. The Olivier sittings, Vivien Leigh, the David Bowie studies from the 1970s, Diana Rigg, Alec Guinness, Barbara Cartland, hundreds of others.

What they have in common is that the subject is never composed. Every one of them looks as though they have just this second finished saying something and are waiting to see whether you were paying attention.

That is a very specific effect and it does not happen by accident. It happens because the man behind the camera was, for the 20 minutes that the sitting lasted, giving somebody the most complete and flattering attention they had ever received.

Which is to say that the thing he was professionally best at in the world was making a person feel seen. He possessed at an extremely high level the exact capacity whose absence destroyed his wife.

In 1964, London Zoo opened a new aviary in Regent's Park, designed by Snowdon in collaboration with the architect Cedric Price and the structural engineer Frank Newby.

It is an enormous angular thing in tension steel and aluminium, held up by a system of struts and cables rather than by conventional framing. It was the first walk-through aviary in Britain, meaning that visitors go inside it and the birds fly around them.

It is a genuinely significant piece of 1960s British architecture. It is Grade II* listed. It was restored at considerable expense between 2019 and 2021 and is now home to a colony of northern bald ibis.

And it was conceived by a man who failed his second-year architecture examinations at Cambridge and never completed the degree.

He made films. "Don't Count the Candles," broadcast in 1968, was a documentary about growing old and it won two Emmy Awards. "Born to Be Small" in 1971 was about people of restricted growth and it won a further award.

The subjects tell you something: old age, disability, people whose bodies placed them outside what British television in 1968 was willing to show. He went back to that territory again and again over 30 years.

Snowdon had polio at 16. He walked with a limp for 70 years. And in the last decade of his life, he used a wheelchair. He knew from the inside and continuously what it was to move through a country that had been designed by people who assumed everybody could climb a step.

He did not treat that as a private matter. He designed a powered platform for wheelchair users which was produced and called the Chairmobile. He chaired a working party on the integration of disabled people that reported in 1976, which came to be known as the Snowdon Report and which fed into real policy.

He was involved with the disability rights commission's predecessor bodies. He founded and funded a fellowship scheme, the Snowdon Trust, which gives grants to disabled students in higher education and which is still operating and has supported some thousands of people.

His maiden speech in the House of Lords was about disabled people. He returned to the subject in that chamber for four decades. When the House of Lords Act of 1999 would have removed him, a life peerage was created so that he could stay and continue it.

Everybody who has looked at this closely, including the people most hostile to him, has reached the same finding, which is that none of it was performance. There was no publicity advantage in disability policy in 1976. It was slow, technical, unrewarding committee work about ramps and grants and lavatory dimensions, and he did it for 40 years.

Post-polio syndrome is one of the more cruel arrangements in medicine. When the polio virus destroys motor neurons, the surviving neurons compensate. They sprout new connections and take over the work of the ones that died.

That compensation is why a great many polio survivors walked and worked and lived ordinary physical lives for decades. The compensation has a cost, and the bill arrives 30 or 40 years later.

Snowdon had polio at 16 in 1946. He was in his 60s when the second act began, and it took the rest of his life. The limp became a stick. The stick became two sticks. By the 2000s, he used a wheelchair much of the time, and by the end of his life, he used it almost entirely.

A man who had spent 40 years in the House of Lords campaigning for wheelchair access, who had designed a powered platform for wheelchair users, who had chaired the working party and written the report and funded the trust, spent the last decade of his life discovering the state of British accessibility from the seat of a wheelchair.

He kept working. Into his late 70s and past 80, he was still taking portraits. He had a studio in Kensington and he had assistants and he had sitters and they came. He photographed the Queen more than once over a period spanning more than 50 years.

In 2008, the authorized biography by Anne de Courcy was published. He was 78 years old and a very large part of the material in that book was material that would have been actionable if it were not true.

Anthony Armstrong-Jones, first Earl of Snowdon, died at his home in Kensington on January 13, 2017. He was 86 years old.

The obituaries were long, and they were careful. Almost every one of them followed the same structure: photographer of genius, reinvented the color supplement, the aviary, the Emmys, the disability work, and then a paragraph, sometimes two, in which the marriage is described in language of extraordinary care.

Turbulent, difficult, both parties, strains on both sides, not a happy union, two people in a difficult marriage.

That is the formulation the British press arrived at collectively in January 2017. And it is not a lie and it is not the truth either.

By 2017, all of the material was public. The note about the manicurist was in print in multiple books. The 24 reasons were in print. Anne Hills was in print. None of it was secret.

The funeral was at St Bartholomew the Great, and it was small, and it was private, and David spoke. Frances was there. Jasper was there. Polly Fry was not part of the official proceedings.

Princess Margaret had been dead for 15 years by then. So had the Queen Mother. Peter Townsend had been dead for 22 years, Anne Hills for 20, Jeremy Fry for 12.

He was buried at Llanddewi Brefi in Wales, near Plas Dinas, the house where he had fallen ill in 1946.

The Snowdon Trust continued and continues. The aviary was restored between 2019 and 2021 and reopened, and if you go to Regent's Park, you can walk into it and there are northern bald ibis flying about inside a structure that was designed by a man who failed his architecture degree and who wrote his wife a note telling her he hated her.

Both facts are true about the same building.

Four serious people have tried to sum this man up and they arrived in four different places.

Anne de Courcy wrote the authorized biography and had extraordinary access to him in his late 70s, and the portrait she produced is the most damaging document that exists about him. And the reason it is damaging is that she did not editorialize. She laid out the childhood, the polio, the two visits, the affairs, the notes, the silences, the sequence in 1976, and she let the material do the work.

Craig Brown in "Ma'am Darling" is the coldest. Brown's argument is transactional. Tony wanted a career of a specific kind at a specific altitude, and marrying the Queen's sister delivered it in about 18 months, and thereafter he drew down her emotional resources for 16 years and disposed of her when the market offered him an exit that he could frame as her fault.

Anne Glenconner is the harshest, and she is the only one who was in the room. She served Margaret for something close to 30 years. She was at the wedding. She was at the dinner parties. She was on Mustique. And her verdict in "Lady in Waiting" is that Snowdon was petty, that he was spiteful, and that he took pleasure in it.

And then there is the fourth verdict, which is Snowdon's own, delivered by omission. He never defended himself. In 57 years, from the wedding to his death, he did not once put a version of the marriage into the public record.

He did not write a memoir when a memoir would have been worth a great deal. He did not brief a journalist. He did not correct anybody. He handed his authorized biographer the material that convicted him and then read the book and said nothing.

Anthony Armstrong-Jones changed the British monarchy, and he changed it in a direction that nobody in 1960 anticipated and that everybody in that family has been living with ever since.

He was the first person without a title to marry a king's daughter in 400 years. He was a working professional with a career he intended to keep. He came from the press in the sense that he made his living from newspapers and magazines and understood exactly how they operated from the inside.

He had a private life that was extensive, complicated, and entirely unmanageable by any palace press office. And he was married into the immediate royal family with a house at Kensington Palace and no constitutional function of any kind.

Before Tony, the royal family married other aristocrats or foreign royals. People who had been raised inside the same set of assumptions and who understood without being told that the first duty was to say nothing. The system depended on that. It had depended on it for centuries.

Tony was the first person to come inside who had not been brought up that way and who had a professional relationship with the people outside the walls.

His divorce in 1978 was the first at the center of that family in four and a half centuries, and it did not destroy the monarchy, and everybody noticed that it did not.

Anne divorced in 1992. Andrew separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996. Charles separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996. The thing that had been unthinkable in 1955, unthinkable enough that a 25-year-old woman gave up the man she loved to prevent it, had become routine within a single generation of Margaret's own divorce.

The premise underneath all of it is that the private life of a royal marriage is publishable material. That premise was established in 1976 on a beach on Mustique in a photograph in the News of the World, and its immediate consequence was exploited by a member of the royal family against another member of the royal family for personal advantage.

He was the first of the new kind: the person inside the family who treated the family as material, who understood the press because he came from it, who lived his private life in a manner that could not be contained, and who worked out before anybody else did that the leak had become a weapon that could be pointed inward.

Princess Margaret was 25 years old when she was told that the man she loved was not available to her, and she did as she was asked in a written statement invoking a principle about the permanence of marriage.

She was told in effect that the institution required a sacrifice and that she was the one who had to make it. She made it. She then married a man who spent 16 years demonstrating to her in handwriting that she had made it for nothing.

And when it ended, the same institution that had extracted the sacrifice processed her divorce without much difficulty at all, because the world had moved and the rule she had been broken on had been abandoned somewhere along the way without anybody telling her.

She kept his ring on until she died. She kept Peter Townsend's photograph beside her bed for the same 24 years. She died at 71 on a February morning with her son and her daughter in the room, seven weeks before her mother.

And Anthony Armstrong-Jones lived another 15 years, working, honored, in a wheelchair in Kensington, and never said a word about any of it.

And his aviary is still standing in Regent's Park, with the birds inside.